Well, ask Midway and their game “Blacksite: Area 61″.

The Story is told pretty quickly. In the opening you get to fight your way through Iraq into a bunker, where one of your team mates touches an alien artifact and promptly gets left behind.

Fast forward to the present day, something’s off and you and your “Echo Team” are sent in to investigate. Of course everything isn’t as it is supposed to be.

The Game

Well, it’s a first person shooter, as such it is straight forward, and you’d figure there isn’t much Midway could have fucked up…. Well, you’d be wrong.

The problem with Area 51 are numerous:

- Only a handful of weapons. What’s up with that? I mean seriously? The “high end” weapon is utterly useless.
- Not many enemies. You have the general foot soldier and a handful of exotics, but nothing in between really.
- Odd save points. I mean seriously, in the car elements which are sort of a crap shoot they put the distance between save points far apart, on foot, not so much a problem.
- You’d want the background? Well, you have to find the “Dossiers”. Stupid really, TELL me the story, give me additional background later.
- Is this a graphic problem I am seeing? Seriously, the amount of graphic errors is just amazing. People running through walls, Non Aliasing…. The list is endless.
- Repetitive anyone? There is no dynamic in the level design, it’s basically a rail shooter where you can dodge the bullets.

Overall it is just painful to see this game having been released. I got through it in less than five hours (on easy I admit, but hey), and I am severely underwhelemed with the game. There are some “nice” moments. Going through Suburbia and shooting stuff up is fun, the fact that a lot of the environment is destructible makes for fun moments (to a degree) but overall it feels very unpolished, like different pieces being put together without any consideration. If you watch the credits in the end that’s pretty much what you get confirmed, too many cooks in the kitchen.

Simply put: Don’t touch it.

Rating: 1/10

In the past Burnout allowed you to unlock new events by winning races or challenges, you navigated over different maps and trying to best yourself and win different medals. With Burnout Paradise this is gone. You either win a game or you don’t. All events are open from the beginning and although you can call up a map for navigation purposes the game itself is “open”, simulating a city with traffic and all the other things you can find in a real city.

The upside of this is that you don’t have to “progress” through the different levels but rather you can pick and chose the kind of races you want to do. The downside is that you have to win each event, there is no second and third place anymore, additionally, there are no “do overs”, if you lose you are “stuck” where ever the finish line is. If you are deeply obsessed about re-trying the same race over and over again this is frustrating because you have to get back to the starting line, but if you have a laid back attitude you can simply drive on and find another event.

One of the great things about the series so far was the ability to play with other people in the same room. Nothing beats having some booze and buddies and laughing over the spectacular crashes that you get each other in. Too bad that with Burnout Paradise there is no more co-op mode. Yep, you read that right. The only way you can play against your buddy if they have their own copy at home. I guess you can use voice chat (together with a USB video camera you can see your buddies face) but maybe I am getting old, but it’s just not the same. Bummer really.

Other things have made it into the new version though, this includes the rather random behaviour of the crash detection, sometimes the car goes boom when it hits a wall, other times it just slides off. Likewise during Rampage Events it seems a bit hit and miss (no pun intended) when you take someone out or they take you out.

Overall, if you can overlook the “free roaming” feature and don’t mind sitting alone in your basement, Paradise is a solid evolution over past titles but not quite as revolutionary as they would like you to believe.

Rating: 6/10

To that end, let me introduce Tom Holt, if you don’t know him yet. I came across his books a few months ago, but only know did I find time to finally read one of his fine writing. The best way I could describe his stories is “funny fantasy”. In “Earth, Air, Fire and Custard” Tom Holt continues the story of Paul Carpenter who happens to work for J.W. Wells, the magic firm from The Sorcerer by Gilbert & Sullivan. I admit, I didn’t realize that this was the fourth book in a series, but it really didn’t do anything to dampen the humour in the book.

In Earth, Air, Fire and Custard Paul finds out that custard is definitely in teh eye of the beholder. And that it really stings. Okay, now the last one was adapted from the back of the book. Essentially (without trying to tell too much of the story) Paul falls in love, falls out of love, visits an alternate dimension (Custard Space), gets two parts of a living sword and visits the Bank of the Dead a few times, only to realize that he really really doesn’t want to be dead (just yet), all the while discovering that not everything is as it seems, or maybe it is, but who knows?

Tom Holt has a subtle sense of humour, one can identify with Paul’s plight (though I have never been to another dimension to the best of my recollection) and feel for the rather (obscure) challenges that it brings. Holt isn’t really slapstick humour, rather it is this little undercurrent that swells over the pages and then bursts with laughter. It is not a Monthy Python in it’s absurdity, but it clearly is cut from the same cloth, albeit a few more muted patterns.

If you enjoy “off the center” humour without the gross out factor that things like “Jackass” provide Tom Holt’s your man. I will definitely try and find the other books.

Rating: 4/5

In post-Civil War northern Spain in 1944, a 12-year-old girl, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), moves with her heavily-pregnant mother and stepfather into a new home in the countryside. Her stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi López) has been sent to this remote area to rid it of a small Republican militia. Largely ignored by the sadistic Vidal, Ofelia, who revels in ancient stories and fairy tales, discovers an immense and ancient labyrinth guarded by a faun (Doug Jones). He tells her she is the long-lost daughter of Hades, the Greek god of the Underworld, and to regain entry to her kingdom she must carry out three tasks. So Ofelia enters a strange and no less dangerous world of fairies and extraordinary creatures such as the terrifying Pale Man (also played by Doug Jones).

The Visual Effects on the movie are what mesmerized me the most. Del Toro has shown several times that he knows well how to use special effects, and it did not overwhelm the experience. The Faun alone was gorgeous, the sequence in a different “dimension” was simple but effective.

If anything I was a bit disappointed how much of the movie was set in our world instead of the world of the faeries. But at the end of the day the story still makes me want to dream, and I am thankful for movies like these….

4/5

The story revolves around a strange young man born in 18th Century Paris, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, whose prodigious gift of an incomparable sense of smell and inexplicable lack of a personal scent isolates him from society. Obsessed with the rich sensory world he alone inhabits, his single objective in life becomes the preservation of the perfect scent: the skin of young, beautiful virgins.

The challenge for the movie clearly was how to show scent in a visual medium, which by itself does not possess any scent. According to several sources it seems many directors didn’t believe it could be done, but Tom Tykwker (of Run Lola Run fame) took on the task and….. succeeded.

The movie is long, almost 2 1/2 hours, but one can sympathize, both with the victims and the murderer, with the victims because they do not deserve to die, and with Grenouille, because he is driven by something that he perceives as larger than him. He initially doesn’t try to kill them, but his attempts to save the essence off of a living woman (a prostitute) fails as she considers him weird, so he kills her, and then choses it as the easier / only way to accomplish his goal.

The movie has no winners, everybody loses, even side characters die once they have met him…..

The movie is cruel, but not obviously so, it isn’t crude.

The women are beautiful, though more in a 21st century kind of way, not in a 18th century France kind of way.

I now want to read the book:

5/5

Technorati Tags: books, Movies, Reviews

In the 1990s in Germany I started to notice a trend where brand names became part of the design, and in fact you had to start wearing certain brands to be “in”. As I never was “in” I never bothered and actually I didn’t care.

In 2004 Pattern Recognition was published and it had a strong “anti-brand” message in the midst of a story about Branding.

But in 2003 a book was published that brought our consumer culture to a somewhat logic conclusion: Jennifer Government.

Jennifer Government is set in the not to distant future, and Max Barry doesn’t pull any punches. Most of the world is part of the US now, by proxy more or less. The Government has been privatized, no more taxes and companies “rule” the world. There are two groups fiercely competing for market-share, the US Alliance and the Team Advantage loyalty programs.

At the core of the story a handful of individuals that by coincidence get drawn into the battle, Violet a “freelance” Programmer who thinks she is making the deal of her lifetime only to realize that if you swim with the sharks you better be one; Jennifer Government a former Ad executive who now works as a Government Watchdog and who has to find her financing before she can go after the bad guys; Hack Nike, a guy who works in Merchandising who one day makes the fateful decision to get a cup of water from the Marketing floor only to be drawn into the plot by a Marketing executive John Nike who has big plans for a new shoe that Nike is going to introduce, even if it means he has to kill people to give the shoe some cred. Then there is Billy NRA who just wants to go skiing in New Zealand only to find himself employed as a killer with the NRA and US Alliance, despite the qualms he has and then there is Buy Mitsui, a guy who is at the wrong time at the wrong place and after seeing a girl die after buying some brand new Nike’s finds his life changed forever.

All of these people act in a world in which consumerism is tops and “Old Europe” is seen as archaic, those savages after all still pay Taxes and the Government is standing in the way of corporate profits, now if John get’s his way there will be no more Government at all. After all, without the corporations people would still live in Caves.

“Jennifer Government” is a wonderfully biting satire that takes a shot at today’s consumerism and may be even more true today than it was three years ago when it was first published. The idea that privatization is the answer to everything that ails North America society is still a strong message in the US (and by extend the rest of the world) right now, and it probably won’t go away.

Corporations have taken charge of large parts of our lives, the small companies hardly exist anymore, even brands that we may think of being small probably belong to a larger conglomerate. So Jennifer Government is not only a satire but also a commentary on consumerism without becoming preachy.

Of course the world of “Jennifer Government” isn’t really all that new, the idea exists since at least the earliest notions of Cyberspace (Neuromancer), the omnipotent corporation always being a fixture. The role playing game Shadowrun comes to mind as an example on how the world can be described as segregated between the “corp have’s” and “non-corp have not’s”.

The book is an entertaining, easy read, Barry jumps between the different characters on a regular basis telling their stories in parallel, my only gripe with this is that the time frame in which these events happen is not always clear, at times it feels like just a day has passed, but then references are made that seem to indicate it may have been months.

Other than that: A nice, funny and entertaining read that may give one something to think the next time you see someone decked out in all gear from one company or whooning over the newest merchandise from brand X.

Rating: 4/5

“Who killed the Electric Car” is half the story of a conspiracy by car companies to not “get us further” while at the same time playing a “whodunnit?” about what truly lead to the demise to the Electric Car in California, it then also goes on to look at the Hydrogene powered car, the one “solution” that the current US Administration is favoring and which is sold as the “next best thing”.

The movie is set up like an investigation. It first spends roughly a third of it’s time to show us how great the EV1 was, then it goes on to show us what happened that lead to it’s end and finally it wraps up by recounting the “real” reasons.

I put real in quotes here because I am sure there are people out there who are starting to call for tinfoil hats once the movie is over and I am not trying to tell my conclusions on this one.

The Audience Reactions where mixed, at times laughing loud at some obvious “American fallacies”, my most favourite one must have been towards the end when one of the interviewed people was basically saying:

When you tell the American consumer to be environment sensitive they think you are telling them to turn down the heat or cooling and drive a small car, you know, live like Europeans.

The movie itself is entertaining though, and it is definitely worth looking at this and maybe starting to wonder why in a hundred years we have not managed to come up with a better way to move ourselves around.

Rating: 4/5

The last adaptation “Paycheck” was just horrible to watch. Now with “A Scanner Darkly” Richard Linklater (of “Waking Life” fame) is giving it a shot and (mostly) succeeds.

The book and the movie are bizzare, what is reality? What is drug induced? In a way it is in the good old vain of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” just less funny and more “hardcore”. And of course there is a morality tale: How far can one go to take down the bad guy/

Rating: 4.5/5*

*Need to see it again, it has cult potential, much like “Waking Life”

Movie:

Funny, Johnny Depp, clearly is an amazing actor and he nails the character well… It’s cult for a reason.

Book:

Of course it came first, and yes, it is a weird book but also hilariously funny. It makes one wonder how much of this has really happened and how much was drug induced. He drank, did drugs and wrote…. Maybe this goes in line, looking at some other funny and hilarious authors. i guess one has to go to the edge to have an appreciation for the absurdity of life and the comedy it is.

Rating (for both): 5/5

Three years later, Jack’s back and….. He’s still funny.

Having said that though, I would like to point out that it has some serious timing issues. The story is simple: Jack has a compass, someone else wants it and won’t stop anywhere to get it. Or so it seems.

The full cast of the first movie is back and at almost two hours it is an epic. It is a funny movie, it is just too bad that most of the funny moments are being carried by Johnny Depp with the other actors just “standing around” for the most part either being the part of the joke or being the observers.

The fact that the movie ends in a cliffhanger does not really help either. Comedy lives off timing and as amazing the movie’s special effects are, the timing is off on occasion.

It’s fun, it’s for popcorn and summer, just not quite as great as the first one, despite all the amazing SFX.

Rating: 3/5